Community Context and Sentencing Decisions in 39 Counties in the United States, 1998 (ICPSR 3923)

Citation

Fearn, Noelle E. Community Context and Sentencing Decisions in 39 Counties in the United States, 1998 . Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005-11-04. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03923.v1

Summary

This study aimed to understand the extent to which
punishment is influenced by the larger social context in which it
occurs by examining both the main and conditioning influence of
community context on individual sentences. The primary research
questions for this study were (1) Does community context affect
sentencing outcomes for criminal defendants net of the influence of
defendant and case characteristics? and (2) Does community context
condition the influences of defendant age, race, and sex on sentencing
outcomes? Data from the 1998 State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS)
were merged with a unique county-level dataset that provided
information on the characteristics of the counties in which defendants
were adjudicated. County-level data included unemployment, crime
rates, sex ratio, age structure, religious group affiliation, and
political orientation.

Citation

Fearn, Noelle E. Community Context and Sentencing Decisions in 39 Counties in the United States, 1998 . Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005-11-04. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03923.v1

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

Time Period(s)

1998

Date of Collection

2000

Data Collection Notes

(1) This study was a multi-level analysis combining
county-level and individual-level data. This data collection only
contains the county-level data used in this study. The
individual-level data are available as STATE COURT PROCESSING
STATISTICS, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, AND 1998: FELONY DEFENDANTS IN
LARGE URBAN COUNTIES (ICPSR 2038). The Final Report for this study
details how cases were selected from ICPSR 2038 and how variables were
created for the analyses. (2) The user guide and codebook are
provided by ICPSR as Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The PDF
file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be
accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat
Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is
provided on the ICPSR Web site.

Study Purpose

This study aimed to understand the extent to
which punishment is influenced by the larger social context in which
it occurs by examining both the main and conditioning influence of
community context on individual sentences. By examining community
variation in criminal sentences, this study contributed to the
knowledge of how formal social control (i.e., the criminal justice
system) operates and is embedded within and shaped by local social
context. The primary research questions for this study were (1) Does
community context affect sentencing outcomes for criminal defendants
net of the influence of defendant and case characteristics? (2) Does
community context condition the influences of defendant age, race, and
sex on sentencing outcomes?

Study Design

This study examined the influence of community
context on several individual-level sentencing outcomes using data
from the 1998 State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) and a unique
county-level dataset that provided information on the characteristics
of counties in which the defendants were adjudicated. The SCPS
provided detailed legal and extralegal data on felony defendants and
their cases from 39 large urban counties across 17 states. These data
were merged with a county-level dataset created specifically for this
project. The county-level data provided detailed information on key
community characteristics, such as the unemployment rate, crime rates,
region, racial composition, sex ratio, age structure, political
orientation, religious affiliation, and sentencing structures.
County-level indicators of unemployment rates, racial composition, age
structure, sex ratio, and geographic location were collected from the
County and City Data Books (2000) and the Census Bureau Summary Tape
Files (2000). County-level crime rates were gathered from the Federal
Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for the year
preceding the felony case filings (1997). Information on religious
group affiliation at the county-level was obtained from the United
States Census of Churches (1997). County-level indicators of
political orientation were collected from the American National
Election Study (1996). Finally, indicators of type of sentencing
structure and guidelines at the county-level were gathered from the
United States Department of Justice National Survey of State
Sentencing Structures (1998). The merged data were used to assess the
main and conditioning effects of several community conditions on the
nature and severity of sentences received by individual defendants.
Sentencing outcomes were measured by (1) the incarceration decision,
(2) the nature of the specific sentence, and (3) the length of
confinement term received. Since the SCPS data used for this study
were obtained from STATE COURT PROCESSING STATISTICS, 1990, 1992,
1994, 1996, AND 1998: FELONY DEFENDANTS IN LARGE URBAN COUNTIES (ICPSR
2038), this data collection only contains the county-level data that
were collected to measure community characteristics.

Sample

The counties included in this data collection were those
that had data in the 1998 State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS)
collection. The SCPS employs a two-stage sampling strategy with 40 of
the 75 most populous counties in the United States selected at the
first stage and then a systematic sample of felony filings within each
county selected at the second stage. In 1998 only 39 counties were
selected because of the large number of felony filings that year. The
second stage of sampling is designed to represent all defendants for
whom felony cases were filed with the court during the month of May.

Universe

Thirty-nine counties in the United States for which 1998
State Court Processing Data were available.

Unit(s) of Observation

counties

Data Source

The county-level data in this collection were compiled
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports
(1997), the Census of Churches (1997), County and City Data Books
(2000), Census Bureau Summary Tape Files (2000), the American National
Election Study (1996), and the United States Department of Justice
National Survey of State Sentencing Structures (1998).

Data Type(s)

administrative records data

Description of Variables

Variables include state and county FIPS codes,
percent unemployed, number of males per females, percent 65 years and
older, violent crimes per 100,000 residents, sentencing structure,
whether the county was located in the South, percent that voted
Republican in the 1992 presidential election, percent Protestant, and
percent Black.

Response Rates

Not applicable.

Presence of Common Scales

Original Release Date

2004-05-20

Version Date

2005-11-04

Version History

2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one
or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well
as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable,
and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to
reflect these additions.

2004-05-20 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented.